“Take time to care for yourself. Pause, listen, and catch your breath. Then make sure everyone around you can breathe, too,” says Dean Gladis Kersaint.

Black lives matter. We share the grief, sadness, and anger at the loss of George Floyd, whose murder follows so closely on that of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and so many others. Each of their lives, like each and every Black life in our community and around the world, is unique, beautiful, and irreplaceable, and deserving of respect and dignity. The great and abiding shame of our nation is our inability to acknowledge, confront, and redress the legacy of white supremacy and the failure of our institutions, particularly our law enforcement institutions, to respect the human rights of black and brown people.

“I urge white Americans to reflect on their intentions for allying with #BlackLivesMatter. I hope that we all understand that supporting black Americans is the right intention. That means doing a lot more than posting on social media,” writes Jack Kitching, a Neag School alumnus and high school social studies teacher in Hartford.

It’s one thing to learn a skill in a class. It’s another to practice it in the real world, where conceptual lines are blurrier than they are in textbooks. It’s a distinction that leads many professional training programs to feature internships, which some may call clinical experiences of practicums, to complement the skills students learn in class. It is one that led the University of Connecticut’s Administrator Preparation Program (UCAPP) to reexamine internships when it began revamping its offerings to strengthen principal training.

Violet Jiménez Sims, a faculty member in the Neag School and New Britain Schools board of education member, comments on the board’s vow of inclusion in response to George Floyd’s death.

“As we piece together what the new normal might look like in our high schools, we should take advantage of this disruption to reconfigure the many moving parts that have been used as excuses for maintaining the status quo,” says Michele Back, an assistant professor of secondary and world languages education in UConn’s Neag School of Education.

“We need to get ahead of this crisis to survive and thrive together. It is time to provide alternate options in education preparation so we can continue to prepare high-quality leaders and teachers within this ‘new normal,'” says Patricia Virella, a Ph.D. student at the Neag School and faculty member at Sarah Lawrence College’s Art of Teaching Program.

We recently spotted a great quote from James C. Kaufman, a Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Connecticut that said: “If creativity is a light, it does not have an on/off switch.”

The University of Connecticut’s Administrator Preparation Program (UCAPP) aims to be a leading leadership program—with a curriculum that guides its students through rigorous, relevant learning experiences so they are prepared to serve as leaders and champions of equity on their first day on the job.

In this post, Dr. Richard Gonzales, director of the university’s educational leadership preparation programs, describes why the university decided to participate in the initiative, its general approach to the work, and the effects it is seeing so far. Other posts include descriptions of efforts to redesign curricula and internships, students’ and faculty members’ views about the new design, and the ways in which the university works with community partners to ensure it is meeting their needs.